CHAPTER LVII 



PLANS AND PROJECTS, EXECUTED AND UNEXECUTED 



1838-1905 



A MONG those who especially attracted my youthful ad- 

 /~\ miration were authors, whether of books or of 

 articles in the magazines. When one of these personages 

 was pointed out to me, he seemed of far greater stature 

 than the men about him. This feeling was especially 

 developed in the atmosphere of our household, where 

 scholars and writers were held in especial reverence, and 

 was afterward increased by my studies. This led me at 

 Yale to take, at first, much interest in general literature, 

 and, as a result, I had some youthful successes as a writer 

 of essays and as one of the editors of the &quot;Yale Literary 

 Magazine ; but although it was an era of great writers, 

 the culmination of the Victorian epoch, my love for 

 literature as literature gradually diminished, and in place 

 of it came in my young manhood a love of historical and 

 other studies to which literature was, to my mind, merely 

 subsidiary. With this, no doubt, the prevailing atmo 

 sphere of Yale had much to do. There was between Yale 

 and Harvard, at that time, a great difference as regarded 

 literary culture. Living immediately about Harvard were 

 most of the leading American authors, and this fact 

 greatly influenced that university ; at Yale less was made 

 of literature as such, and more was made of it as a means 

 to an end as ancillary in the discussion of various mili 

 tant political questions. Yale had writers strong, vigor 

 ous, and acute : of such were Woolsey, Porter, Bacon, and 

 Bushnell, some of whom, and, above all, the last, had 



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